Intelligent Load Balancing

Any more advanced type of load balancing (compared to simple round robin or random methods), implying some form of intelligence when deciding where to send each request.

One or more of the following techniques is usually implemented, depending on the capabilities of the load balancer device/software:

weight-based - the server administrator will assign xx% to server A, xx% to server B, depending on the capabilities of the hardware

minimum-load - the load balancer will detect the load on each of the target servers, and select the server with the least load

last-access-time - based on when a server was last accessed, the load balancer will decide whether or not it is capable of serving the current request

parameter-based algorithms - selected by the software developer or server administrator, to provide a weighting based on the functionality that will be executed (for example, all large reports may be processed by a specific server)